The US military throughout East Asia is notorious for doing sex crimes

That’s just called using heuristics, friend, though if ADHD impeded their progress in math, maybe ADHD people rely more on heuristics than neurotypicals do.

NK isn’t telling South Koreans that they must leave their homes for being the wrong ethnicity.

I think it depends heavily on where you are, since there is at least one dedicated transitioning institution and other institutions that support transitioning, but then there are other places with virtually no support. It’s definitely something Cuba is better about.

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You say that the soviet political education that you received was boring because it did not focus enough on contemporary and concrete issues, and this makes perfect sense. But do we need to throw away DIaMat? Wouldn’t it be better to relate DiaMat to existing issues to make it more concrete?

This is kind of what I was trying to get at when I suggested that perhaps Soviet education fell into formalism and phrase-mongering, but you expressed it much better than I did.

I don’t think diamat is central to Lenin at all. If you think it is, please explain how.

The most direct example I know of is Lenin explaining at length the importance of a historical materialist grounding in “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism”. Here’s the link to an English translation since I don’t know Russian.

That said, I think a still simpler and more direct inference can be drawn from the fact that historical materialism (which, let us remember, is diamat applied to history) is the core of Marxism, something summarized well in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and Lenin, as a dedicated Marxist, is working from this framework.

Also a nice false dichotomy there between diamat and liberal economics, very productive.

There’s no need to be cute, and crying fallacy fails to prove the antithesis even if we assumed you were correct that what I said was fallacious.

But it was not, as the three groups in discussion were early Soviets (Marxists), latter Soviets (revisionists), and liberals. The question was where the revisionists fell in the power struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Now, if you believe the revisionists were actually some other, completely distinct thing despite their track record of liberalizing the Soviet Union, that’s not necessarily invalid, but then you would need to introduce what you think it is. Without your having done that, what we are left with is a broadly successful early Soviet Union and the moribund late Soviet Union, and we need to figure out some way to distinguish why one was superior to the other. I suggested one framework, but you can refute it and suggest another, though I encourage you to not nebulously talk about being taught “politics” as though historical materialism is not a political theory. If you believe another political theory is superior, you can say so, but don’t dally in vagaries.

Doesn’t that mean there is now a force of repulsion but not of attraction?

Does relativity involve repulsion like he describes?

I certainly won’t contradict you on the political illiteracy of latter generation Soviets. The majority that I have encountered (though my sample is deeply skewed as an American) have been politically incoherent to a jarring degree.

However, it seems to be plainly absurd to say that throwing away diamat would help people embrace the accomplishments of the earlier Soviet Union. Do you think that Lenin and Stalin viewed the subject as irrelevant philosophical bullshit? Or did they view it as an integral element of their understanding of politics? Do you think that the revisionists were really too keen on Marxist economics and not keen enough on liberal economics when their entire project was the liberalization of the Union?

It seems to me like you see clearly the symptoms but are just assuming the cause. Have you considered alternative hypotheses, like the transmission of Marxist theory falling into formalism and phrase-mongering rather than existing as a living revolutionary project?

No defending the OP more generally, but here’s Mao in On Contradiction, emphasis mine:

Changes do take place in the geography and climate of the earth as a whole and in every part of it, but they are insignificant when compared with changes in society; geographical and climatic changes manifest themselves in terms of tens of thousands of years, while social changes manifest themselves in thousands, hundreds or tens of years, and even in a few years or months in times of revolution. According to materialist dialectics, changes in nature are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in nature. Changes in society are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in society . . .

Oh, you’re named after the podcast, then?

You’re sidestepping most of what I said. If the ruling class is not the proletariat but in fact a smaller group that controls the MoP, and does commodity production to pursue maximized profits, paying the broader population wages, etc., then it’s still capitalism whether the nominal position of the MoP is the monopolistic control of private entities or of state entities, in the case of the state not being controlled by the people. It’s only a DotP if it’s actually a democratic state.

The key difference between AES and other states is the role of the goverment, AES are held accountable by the people not the capitalists. We could argue about the degree of consolidation of power, the efficiency of their tasks, and many other things, but calling them revisionists? That’s just silly.

If we took as granted the claim that they are truly democratic rather than bureaucratic or some other antidemocratic form of government, including ones with populist paint like the liberal democracies we are so familiar with. What evidence do you have that they are democratically controlled? High approval ratings don’t cut it, kings can also be popular. I look at Xi’s speeches and, contrary to what we like to get out of his claims about democracy, most of his speeches are notoriously filled with pablum and dogmatism (mostly “Deng was right” a thousand different ways), not at all the way that you address an engaged populace that you have the slightest degree of intellectual respect for, much less one that has been given an effective Marxist education. You can make a very good argument for Cuba being democratic by pointing to various types of civic engagement, but I’m not confident that you can make the same claim about China.

You can split hairs and say that it’s a bureaucratic state, but all you’d be doing is splitting hairs. It’s still fundamentally oriented around commodities being sold for profit, a common definition of capitalism.

Deng was definitely playing with fire, though as you suggest the PRC was much more in control of the burn than the other capitalist powers. Had I come into communism about 5-10 years earlier than I did my position would be much closer to yours. However, it seems to me the Xi administration has been doing a good job cutting the excesses and purging capitalist roaders. They have a lot more work to do, but they seem best equipped to fight the class struggle, both domestically and internationally, of any country.

I suppose then the question is if it’s just a very-disciplined capitalist power or a socialist one, because Xi is doing a great job of maintaining and developing the state, but I don’t think anything he is doing is incompatible with just being a responsible capitalist politician running a tight ship.

There’s should never be shame about ruthless criticism of all that exists.

Yeah, I just wanted to make it clear that it’s not a “the authoritarian mods are silencing me” issue and just that I don’t feel like arguing about this most of the time, though I decided to here.

The rightly-praised train system is not for-profit, but they make a killing on oil, for example.

I’m not an economist, I can’t really tell you why that’s what they do, but I’m pretty confident they do it.

That there would be some amount of revisionism is precisely my expectation of AES states. It’s not like I said they weren’t socialist – and from a practical standpoint we can say pretty confidently that they all are, most especially the DPRK and Cuba.

“Revisionist” is basically shorthand for “deviating in some way from fundamental Marxist principles” which is a subset of “erroneous from a Marxist perspective”.

“No true scotsman” isn’t just a vibe, it’s a specific type of fallacy. If I say that “No X is Y” and you say “I know John, he’s an X and he is Y” and I reply "He’s not really X then, because no true X is Y," I am performing the fallacy in its most archetypal form. Basically, it is asserting that no member of a group has some (usually negative) trait and, when confronted with a counterexample, saying that the presence of the trait in that example means the example wasn’t really a member of the group.

Dumb college kids do indeed do “no true scotsman” all the time when reactionaries say “reds killed trillions” and they say “but that wasn’t real communism, man” to preserve their ignorant idealization without really understanding either Marxist theory or the actual evidence around AES history.

I don’t have anything that I’m trying to disavow, and in fact am making claims of various kinds against these states (though I might have been unfair to Cuba, admittedly) without any interest in protecting some group of “true scotsman”.

It certainly is not a liberal capitalist state as such, though the bourgeoisie represent a real force as you imply, but there is also capitalism in state industries when they are run for profit, which currently is the bulk of China’s economy.

I think people jump to “Read On Authority” to quickly, a behavior that amounts to scripture-quoting, but

I just threw it into chatgpt, I think I understand now. It’s basically saying that some level of authority is necessary for society to function (which I wouldn’t have argued against otherwise).

chatgpt sucks and has demonstrated that again here. On Authority essentially argues that a socialist revolution 1: is itself a monumental exercise of authority and 2: requires authority to be protected when it exists in a world fundamentally hostile to it. There are some ancillary arguments about command structures, but overall it is written in opposition to anarchist dogmatism about “Authority” being an evil thing that must be discarded.

I’ll let someone else unpack the “Stalinist Russia” part